Bitly is one of the world's most popular URL shortening service, established in 2008,
bitly is a privately held and NYC based Company.
Bitly shortens over half a billion links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. From brands, marketers, publishers, government organizations, non-profits and individual users,
bitly serves everyone. One of the reasons behind
bit.ly being a very popular and loveable service is, twitter. Since the character limit for a tweet is 140, pasting a long link eats up most of the character space and you won't able to add any message into your tweet, that's where bit
.ly comes in, it replaces your very long URL with a short one which can easily be used with the tweet. Back in 2009, bit
.ly was the default URL shortening service for twitter, but eventually it was replaced by twitter own branded URL shortening service
T.CO, in-spite of that, bit
.ly still is widely in use and
acceptable by twitter.
Anyone can join
bitly since it's free and open to all, the working of
bit.ly is very smooth and the interface is very easy and clean, it's not necessary that you sign-up for the service in order to shorten your
links but having
a account with the bit
.ly has
it's own privileges, for example, you can see stats for all of your links, you've all your
bitlinks listed in your account, you can create bundles (A bundle is a collection of Bitlinks. They can be just for you, for your friends, or for the world. They're easy to make, curate, and share. ), you can use your custom domain with
bitly, for instance, this is a long link to YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yab0sXGEjg and this one is a short URL with my
free custom domain, for the same YouTube video
http://refer.ml/1LbHqwv , and if I want to see the stats for my link, all I need to do is to add "+" in the end of the URL,
http://refer.ml/1LbHqwv+ .
Bitly offers a paid solution for the large companies/enterprises which is called
Bitly Enterprise or Bitly Brand Tools. It provides advanced branding features. Many big companies and internet giants
relies on
bit.ly as their link shortening service; for example, The New York Times uses
nyti.ms, Pepsi uses pep
.si, and verizon uses
vz.to, all of them are being served by
bitly. This allows the companies to push brand awareness on services such as Twitter by using the
bitly engine to generate the shortened URLs and track marketing metrics.
Bitly Enterprise also has advanced analytics features and uses
bitly data to provide advanced social insight tools for companies and brands.
Bitly has browser extensions that you can use to shorten the link without even visiting bitly.com website, it is also available as an iPhone app. In addition to that if you've a WordPress
(self-hosted) blog/site, bit
.ly provides you a plugin that will create short links for all your blog posts. Bit
.ly uses 3 domains in total, bitly.com, bit
.ly and
j.mp. Just in case one domain is restricted in your country, you can access the link by changing it with alternative domain. For example, if you cannot access a link
bit.ly/x you can try
bitly.com/x or
j.mp/x instead.
Bitly for feelings is another cool feature
(in beta), where you can express how you feel about the content you're sharing,
bitly provides various
domain for that purpose, don't agree
? -
use oppos.es, Liked something -
upvot.es, something scary -
scaryto.me, something funny -
lolthis.me.
Click here to know more about Bitly for Feelings.
